Double world champion Pecco Bagnaia summarised his disappointing run to 12th in the Aragon Grand Prix MotoGP sprint as the reality of his weekend - rather than a dip in form after a surprisingly strong qualifying - and another indictment of his ongoing lack of feeling with the 2025 Ducati MotoGP machine.
But while he talked of the potential for a future breakthrough, his Aragon performance and how ill-at-ease he seems on the bike makes a breakthrough look further away than ever.
Starting from fourth after a decent run in qualifying in which he looked at times like he might even challenge team-mate Marc Marquez for pole position, when the race started he slowly dropped down through the field to finish up outside the points in 12th place. He made multiple errors that allowed rivals ahead and was 14 seconds away from winner Marquez at the end of the 11 laps.
"I knew that it could have been difficult today," Bagnaia explained afterwards. "In the FP2 this morning, I was struggling. I wasn't happy with my feeling. In qualifying, I just gave it a lot, risked a lot, and I started in P4.
"In the race I was giving it everything, but I wasn't able to force it. I wasn't able to brake hard, the font was locking a lot, I was understeering a lot, and it was really tough.
"I went wide just trying to copy the rider in front of me, to brake in the same place as them, but I started to lock and I had to go wide. Then I was stuck there."
Unfortunately for him, that's something that essentially fits with Bagnaia's whole year up until this point - and it seems to be a situation that's being made even worse by the high temperatures of the Motorland Aragon circuit.
While he was still upbeat as he cracked jokes at his own expense about the depth of his despair as he spoke to the media, and confident that he's going to find a solution to the problems that they've faced so far this year, it's nonetheless starting to look worse and worse for Bagnaia.
In races this year he seems at best able to just maintain position. That's a hallmark of his incredible defensive riding abilities, but he's wholly unable to push forwards or make progress.
It's looking more and more like it's going to take a wholesale change to the Ducati GP25 to find any way out of the problems that his side of the garage is currently facing.
That isn't easy to do, either, with at least some of the problems coming from the engine design that Ducati has now homologated until the end of 2026 - and because it's hard to make a case for big changes when team-mate Marquez proved in first place that it still is possible to make the current machine win even if the year-old GP24 bike looks to be a stronger package.
This weekend Bagnaia switched to a design of front fork that he hasn't previously been comfortable with but that Marquez and the team insist is better. It certainly didn't make Bagnaia's pace any better.
The lack of confidence he feels in the bike is very visible to other riders, especially his long-time team-mate Jack Miller.
Now at Pramac Yamaha, Miller was first paired with Bagnaia when Pramac ran Ducatis and they then graduated to the works team together in 2021.
Miller spent a lot of the sprint racing with Bagnaia and could see how wrong it's going for him.
"It's a confidence thing, it's a feeling thing," Miller explained.
"I spent many, many, many laps behind Pecco in my career. And today especially, just looking at him, he was very neutral on the bike, not a lot of hang-off, which is generally Pecco's strong point.
"His inside shoulder is basically normally equal with the inside of the bike, he uses his body a lot, something I wish I could do more.
"Today he was rather neutral with the bike, or in the centre, because he doesn't trust what he's doing or what it's going to do, especially up through the first flowing couple of corners.
"He makes the bike turn in a lot with less lean angle - and it's something it seems like he's struggling to do at the moment."
